


First Poem For You

by evenso



Series: They Said It Better [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Eternity is not the same as forever, Falling In Love, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Inspired by Poetry, Kim Addonizio
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-27
Updated: 2013-09-27
Packaged: 2017-12-27 19:41:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/982843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evenso/pseuds/evenso
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cas falls in love.  Then he falls.  Then he falls in love.  Then he falls into a routine.  And then he falls in love.</p><p>(Third in the set.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	First Poem For You

So it turns out there’s a difference between eternity and forever.

This is another one of Cas’ little philosophies, and neither one of the Winchesters really has that much patience for metaphysics, but they’ll listen if he explains it in the right way.

Sam still doesn’t really have his own room, just a bed where he sleeps. If Sam belongs anywhere, it’s among the stacks of the books that have slowly become his - as he’s slowly become theirs, assimilating their words, carrying the old-leather-and-dust smell of them around on his skin. Cas remembers fragments of passages he never saw with human eyes. Sam remembers more, picked up the honest way, through reading and re-reading until Dean flicks on another lamp and hassles him about ruining his eyes. So Cas talks to him in metaphors and borrowed quotes.

He says, if all the world’s a stage, angels were the audience. He says, “No, I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be, am an attendant lord...” and that’s all he should ever have been. Someone who saw sea creatures glowing miles down in the dark, watched rain clouds form, waited on a celestial cold war to heat up and even then was not much more than a button pusher, a cannon-fodder lower recruit, someone who at best served to “swell a progress, start a scene or two” - a tool in the hands of his Father, for the work that he did on his best-loved children. Cas wasn’t supposed to have free will, because Cas - Castiel that was - wasn’t supposed to have to make any choices. Choices are for important people.

That might sound like it sucks, Cas says. It didn’t. It was like watching Waterloo and Thermopylae and every sunset since the creation of the horizon, all at once. I had a front-row seat to the greatest, the only story ever told, and I was sure it had a happy ending. I was a cog in a perfect machine, and it was a pleasure to serve.

Sam can’t understand that, because Sam wasn’t made for that. He was always supposed to stand tall, the world balanced on his shoulders - even if he was expected to tip it the other way. Sam is actually Prince Hamlet, and was meant to be.

The difference, Cas tries again to explain, is specificity. It was important that Sam be Sam, that he be the product of these specific bloodlines, that he have the experiences he did. If he hadn’t had those fights with John, if he hadn’t had one hard-bitten hunter grandfather and one intellectual one, if he hadn’t met Jess, who knows how the world would have turned out? Or even if he thought clowns were funny, or if he liked burgers as much as Dean - it all matters, the entire world comes to a point here, in this one guy, limited in perspective, seriously fucked up, and irreplaceable. And he’s only here for the blink of an eye.

Castiel could see everything, do nothing. Cas, like Sam, has a past, and a present, and an increasingly short future. He can’t see any further than these two eyes, and even if he can see what he should do, he might not be strong enough to do it. He decides on something and that’s it, he has to live with it. It’s written in stone. But he gets to make the choice. He gets to try.

Does he miss being an angel? Sam asks, and Cas can tell from his voice he thinks he already knows the answer. Sam probably thinks he can relate a little, refusing to settle into his room, reaching for the books like they could help him know everything all at once. Sam would like to let go of a few specifics, Cas is sure. 

No, Cas says, he doesn’t. But explaining why - he doesn’t have the words to say it to Sam.

Dean doesn’t have any problem being specific. He claimed a room, then a dozen other little spaces around the bunker - a favorite chair, a place he always sits at at the table. He found himself a bathrobe, worked out which mug was his favorite, decided which restaurants in the near vicinity had the best burgers and pie. There are times when it drives Cas crazy, how damn certain the man is of all the tastes and habits and instincts he’s had since he was teenager, how fucking sure he is that he doesn’t need to expand his horizons. 

On the other hand, Dean doesn’t waste a single one of his days. He doesn’t stop and wait and worry about how permanent something is - he just goes ahead and does something he can never take back. If Dean gets bored and decides he wants another tattoo, he goes out and gets it that same day. And when he decides that now, when Cas is human and freaking out over shoelaces, is the best time to kiss him, he just does. Like it’s nothing, and in a way, it will be. Just give it another hundred years.

Not that Dean thinks it’s nothing. Nobody could ever accuse Dean of not caring. It’s just that he gets it, somehow, he’s got this miraculous soap bubble life span to live in and he doesn’t spend any of his time trying to pop it just to see what’s on the other side. He pulls you in, makes you stop and enjoy what you’re eating, coaxes you to sing along to the radio. Sam could learn from him. Cas does learn from him.

But Dean is also a stubborn ass who acts like if it isn’t in the tiny little circle of his life, it isn’t and wasn’t and won’t be important, and Cas is a part of that life now, but what about the person, or being, or whatever that he used to be? Is he just supposed to forget all that, because it didn’t happen in the near-to-forty years now that the world’s supposedly spun around Dean Winchester? Cas still doesn’t understand how he can want to break this man’s jaw and kiss his hands at the same time. He’s awful, he’s a miracle, he’s so very fucking specifically himself. 

Divine love is - well, Cas is finding it harder and harder to remember. But human love is pretty easy to define. Human love is knowing that even if you had the kind of near-eternal life expectancy Castiel once had, you’d never have time enough to spend on all the perfect contradictions of your beloved.

Dean hates being called words like that. He bitches about them every single time, so Cas doesn’t say them anymore. But every time he stifles one, he feels a little sting of resentment, and it scares him. He’d die for Dean; Dean’d die for him. It’s so much harder to live together.

They could screw this up. At best, Cas gets, what, forty more years of him? Probably less, considering how he’s lived. He’s going to have to watch this man fade away and slip off into whatever heaven’s become. Or he’s going to have to watch this man watch him slip away first, and those are the best case scenarios. He could also lose him this afternoon. The only sure thing about being a human is that nothing lasts, and it’s not fucking fair, he missed out on so many years and the clock is ticking on the ones that are left - and then they fight, and lose another day. What he wouldn’t give sometimes to go back in time, or else to hold them up, while they’re still young enough, and give them the time to work it out.

But if he could, then he wouldn’t have yesterday’s memory. They were both in the kitchen, ignoring each other, and then Dean stubbed his toe, and he looked so funny hopping that Cas laughed. And then Dean was pissed at him for laughing, and then Cas was pissed at Dean being pissed, and then Dean laughed at Cas’ pissed face, and in the end they were both laughing, Dean’s weight on his arm over Cas’ shoulders as he clutched at his toe. At that moment, Cas still thought Dean was an asshole, but he also thought, this is it. This is the defining love of my life. And however much he rolls his eyes when Cas says stuff like that, he can tell Dean feels the same way. Castiel, who was an angel, would have skipped over that incident, or changed it somehow. Cas is just some guy, and he can’t - and he wouldn’t.

Cas doesn’t use words to tell Dean much of anything. He figures out exactly how Dean likes his coffee, and then he brings it to him in the mornings. He watches movies he doesn’t really care about so that the next time Dean makes a joke, he’ll understand the reference. When they’re pissed at each other again and Dean leans into his shoulder, he sighs and takes it as the apology it is, and leans back. Cas was never supposed to be so active, so specific - but he is. And so that’s how he loves. 

Cas explains forever to Dean like this: he kisses Dean’s mouth and loses a moment he could have had to press his lips against his temple and smell his hair. But Dean’s mouth leads his jaw, and then Cas can stop at his neck, or slip further, to kiss the colored pictures under his skin, but he can’t do both at once - each choice a little opportunity lost, a little opportunity gained, and permanent now. He can’t change what’s happened, he can’t tell what’s coming, but he’s got this minute to decide in, this hour’s worth of life to spend, and he’s given them to Dean. Forever.

**Author's Note:**

> “First Poem for You”, by Kim Addonizio
> 
> I like to touch your tattoos in complete  
> darkness, when I can’t see them. I’m sure of  
> where they are, know by heart the neat  
> lines of lightning pulsing just above  
> your nipple, can find, as if by instinct, the blue  
> swirls of water on your shoulder where a serpent  
> twists, facing a dragon. When I pull you
> 
> to me, taking you until we’re spent  
> and quiet on the sheets, I love to kiss  
> the pictures in your skin. They’ll last until  
> you’re seared to ashes; whatever persists  
> or turns to pain between us, they will still  
> be there. Such permanence is terrifying.  
> So I touch them in the dark; but touch them, trying.
> 
>  
> 
> (Also: obviously Cas is referencing Shakespeare with the "world's a stage". The other quote, which starts "no, I am not Prince Hamlet" is from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot, which I really really wanted to use but it's a little too long.")


End file.
